Face Value: If You Look Old for Your Age, Are You Healthy?

If you look a little old for your age, that doesn't necessarily mean you have poor health, a new study finds.

The finding challenges a long-held idea, said researchers from St. Michael's Hospital in Canada.

"Physicians have simply assumed that their quick assessment of how old a person looks has diagnostic value,"
Dr. Stephen Hwang, a research scientist at St. Michael's and an
associate professor at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.
"We were really surprised to find that people have to look a decade
older than their actual age before it's a reliable sign that they're in
poor health."

The researchers had 126 people ages 30 to 70 fill out a questionnaire that scored their physical and mental health. Then they took photos of the patients and gave them to 58 doctors to assess how old the patients looked. Doctors then guessed how healthy the patients were.

The doctors were unable to predict the health statuses of patients who looked up to five years older than their actual age.
But doctors were able to accurately guess the health statuses of
patients who looked 10 or more years older than they were, the study
said.

Doctors sometimes make snap judgments about patients' health based on whether they look old
or young for their age, Hwang said. But they shouldn't assume that
people who look young are healthy and people who look just a little
older than their age are not, he said.

The study was published Nov. 5 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Amanda Chan

Amanda Chan was a staff writer for Live Science Health. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and mass communication from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.